Bromfield Acton-Boxborough rower Eliza Straayer won the singles event, and Courtney Clark and Jayden Whitney won one of the flights of doubles in the Massachusetts Public School Regatta Association’s spring State Championship Regatta in Lowell on Sunday, May 29. The team also competed in boys doubles and boys and girls 8+s, finishing up their spring sprinting season on the 1,500-meter Merrimack River course.
Time trials in the morning yielded seeds in A and B finals for the big boats. The girls and boys first varsity 8+s, as well as the boys third varsity 8+, were fast enough to compete in the A finals at day’s end. Crowds were thick along the river with the Merrimack Carnival in full swing across Pawtucket Boulevard.
Coxswain and Bromfield senior Sophie Thompson celebrated the day as “one last race rowing together as a team before the seniors go off to college,” adding that the first varsity 8+ took power strokes for each senior during their A final. “I’m really proud of everyone this season because everyone put in a lot of work and a lot of extra time to help the team run efficiently,” she said. “Last year was not as normal, and it was great to come together for this last regatta and just be together as a team.”
Rower Ryan Crowley, an Acton-Boxborough senior and a captain on the boys team, said their first varsity 8+ had a great time trial on Sunday morning. “We raced really hard; we beat Duxbury who had beat us the week before, and we were only two seconds from Brookline,” he said. But at the end of the day the crew pulled up short. “I thought we did a really good job; we just didn’t go as fast as we normally do. Sometimes that’s the case,” he said.
On Monday, the day after the regatta, USRowing notified BA-B boys varsity coach Gary Piantedosi that his petition to enter the BA-B boys first varsity 8+ in its Youth National Championship regatta had been granted. The crew had finished fifth by a fraction of a second in the regional qualifying regatta in May, where the top four boats advanced.
With the petition granted, those athletes will join singles racer Eliza Straayer in Sarasota, Florida, to represent BA-B from June 9 through 12. Last year, Crowley recalled, the team’s first varsity 4+ did better than expected at Nationals. “We went down there and shook some crews. We put our name out and said, ‘Hey guess what, we’re pretty fast.’ So that’s our goal again,” he said. “We’ve got a good shot to do some work down there.” Crowley added that Piantedosi had planted a seed back in the fall: “Let’s send an 8+ to Nationals,” the coach told the team. Crowley recalled the team’s reaction: “We were like, what are you, crazy? But we came out of winter training and have been working hard all spring season, and we are proud of what we’ve done.”
BA-B alumnae are NCAA champs
While the BA-B boats were barreling up the Merrimack at MPSRA, three alumnae were at the world-class racecourse in Sarasota making history. Kaylee Liu (AB ’20), a rower, and Rachel Shrives (Bromfield ’20), an alternate coxswain, won the NCAA Division III National Championship with their Wellesley College crew; rower Summer Maxwell (AB ’20) finished sixth in the nation with her Tufts University team. Liu and Shrives are, according to BA-B rowing program director Holly Hatton, the team’s first NCAA champions. And they did it during the 50th anniversary year of Title IX, the federal civil rights law that transformed access to sports for female athletes in America.
The future continues to look bright for BA-B, Hatton said. “It was nice to see strong performances from our younger rowers in the MPSRA, with gold for our middle school girls in the novice double, a silver medal for our novice girls 4+, and bronze for the novice boys 4+. This bodes well for next fall.”
Jill Maxwell is a BA-B parent.
Girls results
- 1x: Eliza Straayer, 1st place, 6 minutes 20.5 seconds
- 2x: Courtney Clark and Jayden Whitney, 1st, Flight 2, 6:21.2
- 1V8+: Melanie Bodtman, Sanjana Rao, Sophia Atwell, Sydney Collet-Callahan, Eliza Straayer, Zoe Gendreau-Distler, Nosara Maxwell, Alissa Horton, and coxswain Sophie Thompson, 5th, A Final, 5:06.8
- 2V8+: Jadyn Whitney, Alexis Nichols, Yolander Yang, Evelyn Huang, Sophia Philipp, Nina Manglani, Mia Hartley, Courtney Clark, and coxswain Hannah Tang, 1st, B Final, 5:37.3
Boys results
- 2x: Leo Sullivan and Sam Goldgar, 5th, Flight 1, 6:03.9
- 2x: Milo Whitbeck and Adam Castriotta, 4th, Flight 2, 5:41.5
- 1V8+: Derek Uhrich, William Pharo, Matthew Chytil, Clark Hanlon, Charles Maxwell, Asher Ryba, Ryan Crowley, Ewan Smith, and coxswain Lucas Villaseñor, 5th, A Final, 4:38.8
- 2V8+: Noah Stein, William Thomas, Nikhil Suri, Abraham Rahman, Aidan Nolde, Milo Whitbeck, Jorgen Johannesen, Adam Castriotta, and coxswain Ben Bluth, 2nd, B Final, photo finish, 4:45.8
- 3V8+: Kyle Sharma, Darren Quek, Jefferey Chang, Trevor Mangus, Maxwell Hurlbut-Lesk, Aidan Lemke, Camden Moran, Josh Whitney, and coxswain Nathan Kushner, 6th, A Final, 5:19.7
